The real King John of England has a murky reputation. We know him for the Magna Carta. We know him as a villain from the tales of Robin Hood. And, at a stretch, we know him as Shakespeare’s earliest monarch, chronologically. Folger Theatre capitalizes on a chance to tell the rarely-told tale of this questionable king in its current production of Shakespeare’s King John, directed by Aaron Posner.
As the Folger describes,
Everything burns, but not every fire is determined by fate. And Washington DC is certainly on fire in various meanings of the word. Politically, socially, and now thanks to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, theatrically as well! This is one fire that fate will not put out! The kickoff to Woolly Mammoth’s Incendiary 2017/2018 season— The Arsonists, by Max Frisch and newly translated by Alistair Beaton, is setting the stage and minds of audience members alike ablaze with a conflagration that just won’t quit.
The truth within a lie. Isn’t that a quaint little sentence that sums up Shakespeare or most of it at any rate? It is if you’re playwright Aaron Posner and you’ve been commissioned to step away from your exceedingly brilliant modern riffs on Chekhov and step into a variation on the Bard’s The Merchant of Venice. Closing out the 2015/2016 season at Folger Theatre, Posner’s latest world premiere District Merchants,